Allan Bloom | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Bloom in 1989 | |
| Born | Allan David Bloom (1930-09-14)September 14, 1930 Indianapolis,Indiana, U.S. |
| Died | October 7, 1992(1992-10-07) (aged 62) |
| Education | |
| Education | University of Chicago (BA,PhD) École normale supérieure |
| Thesis | The Political Philosophy of Isocrates (1955) |
| Doctoral advisor | Leo Strauss |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy |
| Main interests | Greek philosophy,history of philosophy,political philosophy,Renaissance philosophy,Nihilism,continental philosophy,French literature,Shakespeare |
| Notable works | The Closing of the American Mind (1987) |
| Notable ideas | The "openness" ofrelativism leads paradoxically to the great "closing"[1] |
Allan David Bloom (September 14, 1930 – October 7, 1992) was an American philosopher,classicist, andacademician. He studied underDavid Grene,Leo Strauss,Richard McKeon, andAlexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught atCornell University, theUniversity of Toronto,Tel Aviv University,Yale University, theÉcole normale supérieure, and theUniversity of Chicago.
Bloom championed the idea ofGreat Books education and became famous for his criticism of contemporary Americanhigher education, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book,The Closing of the American Mind.[2] Characterized as aconservative in the popular media,[3] Bloom denied the label, asserting that what he sought to defend was the "theoretical life".[4]Saul Bellow wroteRavelstein, aroman à clef based on Bloom, his friend and colleague at the University of Chicago.
Bloom was born inIndianapolis, Indiana, tosecond-generation Jewish parents who were bothsocial workers. The couple had a daughter, Lucille, two years earlier. As a thirteen-year-old, Bloom read aReader's Digest article about the University of Chicago and told his parents he wanted to attend; his parents thought it was unreasonable and did not encourage his hopes.[5] Yet, when his family moved to Chicago in 1944, his parents met apsychiatrist and family friend whose son was enrolled in the University of Chicago'shumanities program for gifted students. In 1946, Bloom was accepted to the same program, starting his degree at the age of fifteen, and spending the next decade of his life enrolled at the university in Chicago'sHyde Park neighborhood.[5] This began his lifelong passion for the 'idea' of the university.[6]
In the preface toGiants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960–1990, he stated that his education "began withFreud and ended withPlato". The theme of this education was self-knowledge, or self-discovery—an idea that Bloom would later write, seemed impossible to conceive of for a Midwestern American boy. He credits Leo Strauss as the teacher who made this endeavor possible for him.[7]
Bloom graduated from the University of Chicago with abachelor's degree at the age of 18.[8] Some of his notable college classmates includedSeth Benardete,Richard Rorty, andStanley Rosen.[9][10] For postgraduate studies, he enrolled in the University of Chicago'sCommittee on Social Thought, where he was assigned classicist David Grene as tutor. Bloom went on to write his thesis onIsocrates. Grene recalled Bloom as an energetic and humorous student completely dedicated to studying classics, but with no definite career ambitions.[5] The committee was a uniqueinterdisciplinary program that attracted a small number of students due to its rigorous academic requirements and lack of clear employment opportunities after graduation.[5] Bloom earned his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought in 1955. He subsequently studied under the influentialHegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève inParis, whose lectures Bloom would later introduce to the English-speaking world. While teaching philosophy at theÉcole normale supérieure in Paris, he befriendedRaymond Aron, amongst many other philosophers. Among the American expatriate community in Paris, his friends included writerSusan Sontag.[11][12][13]
Bloom studied and taught in Paris (1953–55) at the École normale supérieure,[14] and Germany (1957). Upon returning to the United States in 1955, he taught adult education students at the University of Chicago with his friendWerner J. Dannhauser, author ofNietzsche's View of Socrates. Bloom went on to teach at Yale from 1960 to 1963, atCornell until 1970, and at the University of Toronto until 1979, when he returned to the University of Chicago. Among Bloom's former students are prominent journalists, government officials and political scientists such asFrancis Fukuyama, Robert Kraynak, Pierre Hassner,Clifford Orwin,Janet Ajzenstat,John Ibbitson,James Ceaser, and Thomas Pangle.
In 1963, as a professor at Cornell, Allan Bloom served as a faculty member of theCornell Branch of the Telluride Association, an organization focused on intellectual development and self-governance. The students received free room and board in theTelluride House on theCornell University campus and assumed the management of the house themselves. While living at the house, Bloom befriended former U.S. Secretary of LaborFrances Perkins.[15] Bloom's first book was a collection of three essays on Shakespeare's plays,Shakespeare's Politics; it included an essay fromHarry V. Jaffa. He translated and commented upon Rousseau's "Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theater", bringing it into dialogue withPlato'sRepublic. In 1968, he published his most significant work of philosophical translation and interpretation, a translation of Plato'sRepublic. Bloom strove to achieve "translation ... for the serious student". The preface opens on page xi with the statement, "this is intended to be a literal translation."[16][page needed] Although the translation is not universally accepted, Bloom said he always conceptualized the translator's role as a matchmaker between readers and the texts he translated.[17][page needed] He repeated this effort as a professor of political science at the University of Toronto in 1978, translatingJean-Jacques Rousseau'sEmile. Among other publications during his years of teaching was a reading of Swift'sGulliver's Travels, titled "Giants and Dwarfs"; it became the title for a collection of essays on, among others, Raymond Aron, Alexandre Kojève, Leo Strauss, and liberal philosopherJohn Rawls. Bloom was an editor for the scholarly journalPolitical Theory as well as a contributor toHistory of Political Philosophy (edited byJoseph Cropsey and Leo Strauss).
After returning to Chicago, he befriended and taught courses with Saul Bellow. In 1987 Bellow wrote the preface toThe Closing of the American Mind.
Bloom's last book, which he dictated while in the hospital dying, and which was published posthumously, wasLove and Friendship, an offering of interpretations on the meaning of love. There is an ongoing controversy over Bloom's semi-closeted homosexuality, possibly culminating, as in Saul Bellow's thinly fictionalized account inRavelstein, in his death in 1992 fromAIDS.[18][19] Bloom's friends do not deny his homosexuality, but whether he actually died of AIDS remains disputed.[20][21]
Bloom attempted to preserve a philosophical way of life for future generations through both scholarly and popular writing. His writings may be placed into two categories:scholarly (e.g.,Plato's Republic) and popular political commentary (e.g.,The Closing of the American Mind).[citation needed]
Bloom's translation and essay on theRepublic is radically different in many important aspects from the previous translations and interpretations of theRepublic. Most notable is Bloom's discussion ofSocratic irony. In fact,irony is the key to Bloom's understanding of theRepublic (see his discussion of Books II–VI of theRepublic.) Allan Bloom says a philosopher is immune to irony because he can see thetragic as comic and comic as tragic. Bloom refers to Socrates, the philosopherpar excellence, in his Interpretative Essay stating, "Socrates can go naked where others go clothed; he is not afraid of ridicule. He can also contemplate sexual intercourse where others are stricken with terror; he is not afraid of moral indignation. In other words he treats the comic seriously and the tragic lightly".[22] Thus irony in theRepublic refers to the "Just City in Speech", which Bloom looks at not as a model for futuresociety, nor as a template for the humansoul; rather, it is a city presented ironically, an example of the distance between philosophy and every potential philosopher. Bloom follows Strauss in suggesting that the "Just City in Speech" is notnatural; it is man-made.
Some reviewers, such as Norman Gulley, criticized the quality of both the translation and the essay itself.[23]
The Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987, five years after Bloom published an essay inNational Review about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students.[24] With the encouragement ofSaul Bellow, his colleague at theUniversity of Chicago, he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life I've led",[5] that critically reflected on the current state of higher education in American universities. His friends and admirers imagined the work would be a modest success, as did Bloom, who recognized his publisher's modest advance to complete the project as a lack of sales confidence. Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews, including one byChristopher Lehmann-Haupt inThe New York Times and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentatorGeorge Will titled, "A How-To Book for the Independent",[25] it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one onThe New York Times Bestseller List for nonfiction for four months.[26]
The book is a critique of the contemporary university and how Bloom sees it as failing its students. In it, Bloom criticizes the modern movements in philosophy and the humanities. Philosophy professors involved inordinary language analysis orlogical positivism disregard important "humanizing" ethical and political issues and fail to pique the interest of students.[27] Literature professors involved indeconstructionism promote irrationalism and skepticism of standards of truth and thereby dissolve the moral imperatives which are communicated through genuine philosophy and which elevate and broaden the intellects of those who engage with them.[28] To a great extent, Bloom's criticism revolves around his belief that the "great books" ofWestern thought have been devalued as a source of wisdom. Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society.The Closing of the American Mind draws analogies between theUnited States and theWeimar Republic. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in theEnlightenment thought ofJohn Locke—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought—had led to this crisis.
For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by 1960s student leaders could leap. (In the same fashion, Bloom suggests, theNazi brownshirts once filled the gap created in German society by the Weimar Republic.) In the second instance, he argued, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood asfreedom of thought, had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or anideology of thought.Relativism was one feature of modern liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching.
Bloom's critique of contemporarysocial movements at play in universities or society at large is derived from his classical and philosophical orientation. For Bloom, the failure of contemporaryliberal education leads to the sterile social and sexual habits of modern students, and to their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.
In one chapter, in a style of analysis which resembles the work of theFrankfurt School, he examined the philosophical effects ofpopular music on the lives of students, placing pop music, or as it is generically branded by record companies "rock music", in a historical context from Plato'sRepublic toNietzsche'sDionysian longings. Treating it for the first time[citation needed] with genuine philosophical interest, he gave fresh attention to the industry, its target-marketing to children and teenagers, its top performers, its place in the late-capitalist bourgeois economy, and its pretensions toliberation andfreedom. Some critics, including the popular musicianFrank Zappa, argued that Bloom's view of pop music was based on the same ideas that critics of pop "in 1950s held, ideas about the preservation of 'traditional' white American society".[29]
Bloom, informed bySocrates,Aristotle,Rousseau, and Nietzsche, explores music's power over the human soul. He cites thesoldier who throws himself into battle at the urging of thedrum corps, the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religioushymn, the lover seduced by the romanticguitar, and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount. He names the pop-starMick Jagger as a cardinal representative of the hypocrisy and erotic sterility of pop-rock music. Pop music employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young and to persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when, in fact, they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Jagger quietly serve. Bloom claims that Jagger is ahero to many university students who envy his fame and wealth but are really just bored by the lack of options before them.[30]
Along with the absence of literature in the lives of the young and their sexual but often unerotic relationships, the first part ofThe Closing tries to explain the current state of education in a fashion beyond the purview of aneconomist or psychiatrist—contemporary culture's leading umpires.
The book met with early critical acclaim including positive reviews inThe New York Times,Time,Newsweek, theChronicle of Higher Education, andThe Washington Post. A second round of reviews was generally more critical.[31]
Martha Nussbaum, apolitical philosopher and classicist, andHarry V. Jaffa, a conservative, argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especiallyFriedrich Nietzsche. Nussbaum wrote that, for Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought.[32]
In a passage of her review, Nussbaum wrote: "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan Bloom? The answer is, we cannot say, and we are given no reason to think him one at all."[32] The criticism of the book was continued by impassioned reviews of political theoristBenjamin Barber inHarper's;Alexander Nehamas, a scholar of ancient philosophy and Nietzsche, in theLondon Review of Books; andDavid Rieff inThe Times Literary Supplement.[33] David Rieff called Bloom "an academic version ofOliver North: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic". The book, he said, was one that "decent people would be ashamed of having written." The tone of these reviews ledJames Atlas inThe New York Times Magazine to conclude that "the responses to Bloom's book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers."[5] One reviewer, the philosopherRobert Paul Wolff writing in the scholarly journalAcademe, satirically reviewed the book as a work of fiction: he claimed that Bloom's friend Saul Bellow, who had written the introduction, had written a "coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades", with the "author" a "mid-fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name 'Bloom.'"[33] Yet some reviewers tempered that criticism with an admission of the merits of Bloom's writing: for example, Fred Matthews, an historian fromYork University, began an otherwise relatively critical review in theAmerican Historical Review with the statement that Bloom's "probes into popular culture" were "both amusing and perceptive" and that the work was "a rich, often brilliant, and disturbing book".[34]
Some critics embraced Bloom's argument.Norman Podhoretz noted that the closed-mindedness in the title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought—namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments. Podhoretz continued, "Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."[35]
In a 1989 article, Ann Clark Fehn discusses the critical reception of the book, noting that it had eclipsed other titles that year dealing with higher education—Ernest Boyer'sCollege andE. D. Hirsch'sCultural Literacy—and quotingPublishers Weekly which had described Bloom's book as a "best-seller made by reviews."[36]
Camille Paglia, a decade after the book's release, called it "the first shot in the culture wars".[37] An earlyNew York Times review byRoger Kimball called the book "an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate."[38]
In an article on Bloom forThe New Republic in 2000, conservative commentatorAndrew Sullivan wrote that "reading [Bloom] ... one feels he has not merely understood Nietzsche; he has imbibed him. But this awareness of the abyss moved Bloom, unlike Nietzsche, toward love and political conservatism. Love, whether for the truth or for another, because it can raise us out of the abyss. Political conservatism because it best restrains the chaos that modernity threatens".[39] More recently, Bloom's book also received a more positive re-assessment fromJim Sleeper inThe New York Times.[3]
Keith Botsford would later argue:
Bloom was writing vigorous polemic at a time when America sought to ensure that the intellect could not (and would not be allowed to) rise above gender and race; the mind was to be defined by its melanin and genetic content, and by what lay between our legs; or, in the academe, the canon was to be re-read and re-defined so that it fitted the latest theorem of gender or race. Bloom would have none of it. He loved people who were first-rate with real love ... Many profited. Others, mainly dwellers in the bas fonds of 'social studies', or those who seek to politicise culture, resented and envied.[8]
Bloom's last book, which he dictated while partially paralyzed and in the hospital, and which was published posthumously, wasLove and Friendship. The book offered interpretations on the meaning of love, through a reading of novels byStendhal,Jane Austen, andFlaubert;Tolstoy in light of Rousseau's influence on theRomantic movement; plays by William Shakespeare;Montaigne'sEssays; and Plato'sSymposium.
Describing its creation, Bellow wrote:
Allan was an academic, but he was a literary man too — he had too much intelligence and versatility, too much humanity, to be confined to a single category ... He didn't like these helpful-to-the-sick cliches or conventional get-well encouragements ... [S]till partially paralyzed and unable even to sign his name, he dictated a book ... I mention this because it was a remarkable thing for a sick man and a convalescent to do and because it was equally remarkable that a political philosopher should choose at such a moment in his life to write about literature ... I like to think that his free and powerful intelligence, responding to great inner impulses under the stimulus of life-threatening sickness, turned to the nineteenth-century novel, to Shakespeare's love plays, and to the Platonic Eros, summoning us to the great poetry of affects and asking us to see what has happened to our own deepest feelings in this age of artificial euphorias.[40]
Of the work,Andrew Sullivan wrote that "you cannot read [Bloom] onRomeo and Juliet orAntony and Cleopatra without seeing those works in a new light. You cannot read his account of Rousseau'sLa nouvelle Heloise without wanting to go back and read it—more closely—again ... Bloom had a gift for reading reality—the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it".[39] Recollecting his friend in an interview, Bellow said "Allan inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air ... People only want the factual truth. Well, the truth is that Allan was a very superior person, great-souled. When critics proclaim the death of the novel, I sometimes think they are really saying that there are no significant people to write about. [But] Allan was certainly one."[41]
Bloom wasgay.[citation needed] His last book,Love and Friendship, was dedicated to his companion, Michael Z. Wu.[citation needed] Whether or not he died ofAIDS is a subject of controversy.[42]
Far from being a conservative ideologue, Bloom, a University of Chicago professor of political philosophy who died in 1992, was an eccentric interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life.
[Paul Wolfowitz said] in Bloom's Chicago circle when he was alive, 'It was sort of, Don't ask, don't tell.' But whether Bloom had AIDS is disputed.
No one ever said it aloud, but it was important to Bloom's friends, none of whom denied his homosexuality, that he died of an auto-immune disease rather than one associated with sexual promiscuity.
